The Mediterranean in Italian Baroque Theater

eScholarship California Italian Studies Title Bodies of Water: The Mediterranean in Italian Baroque Theater Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dv7n1dk Journal California Italian Studies, 1(1) Author Snyder, Jon Publication Date 2010 DOI 10.5070/C311008855 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Bodies of Water: The Mediterranean in Italian Baroque Theater Jon R. Snyder The Mediterranean is not merely geography. [. .] The Mediterranean is not merely history. — Predrag Matvejevi ć 1 Così convertendo il suo remo in penna, il suo mare in inchiostro, e la sua trireme in un libro manuscritto, il feci scorrer per l’Egeo de’ letterati, accioché mi dicessero, s’egli era bastante per resistere agli assalti de’ pirati malevoli, e fatto sicuro alfine da mordaci incursioni, alle stampe il diedi. 2 Thus wrote Giovan Battista Andreini (1576-1654), arguably the leading Italian comic playwright of the seventeenth century, in the dedicatory preface to the revised edition of his early comedy entitled Lo schiavetto (The Little Slave). 3 In personifying the process through which the original script of the play was transformed into this published literary work, Andreini employs an extended metaphor that must have made ready sense to his contemporary Baroque readership. For the character whose name also serves as the title of the work is portrayed in these lines as an unwilling participant in a central institution of early modernity—one whose very existence depended upon Mediterranean voyages. The “little slave” is, without a doubt, a galley slave, although one who in Italy will exchange his “oar” for a “pen,” salt water for “ink,” and his ship for a manuscript. The detailed vocabulary employed by Andreini—including such terms as “pirates,” “assaults,” “incursions,” “trireme[s],” “sea” and “oar[s]”—refers to the Mediterranean- wide system of human trafficking that supplied manpower for the many galleys navigating its waters, whether they belonged to Christians or Muslims, Europeans or Ottomans. The playwright thus reminds his readers that Muslims were not the only raiders to prey on mercantile shipping or to strike at coastal communities, and that not only Istanbul, Tunis, and Cairo were host to slave markets: for slavery was practiced on both the northern and southern shores of the early modern Mediterranean. 4 At the same time, however, the fierce literary-critical controversies of the age in Italy are likened by the work’s author to the “Aegean” Sea, namely a place of danger in which there lurk “malevolent pirates”/critics whose “biting” assaults are among the risks that 1 Predrag Matvejevi ć, Mediterranean: a Cultural Landscape , trans. Michael Henry Heim (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999), 7, 10. 2 G.B. Andreini, unnumbered page of dedication to Girolamo Priuli, Lo schiavetto comedia di G.B. Andreini fiorentino (Venice: G.B. Ciotti, 1620). Girolamo Priuli was the son of the Doge of Venice, Antonio Priuli, who served in this capacity from 1618 to 1623. 3 For the original edition of the play, see G.B. Andreini, Lo schiavetto (Milan: Pandolfo Malatesta, 1612). 4 See Iain Chamber’s essay in this issue of California Italian Studies , and his reflections on the Mediterranean and slavery in Mediterranean Crossings. The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 38-41 . 1 ships/manuscripts must run as they cross this sea of “ink” powered by the oar/pen of the slave/writer. The identity of the galley slave is, like that of the literary text, bound up with the notion of crossing over a body of water, whether literally or metaphorically. 5 In the character of the Schiavetto, and the metaphors used here to describe both the “little slave” and his play, is implicit a vision of the Mediterranean that also appears, as I will argue in this essay, in at least two other thematically related plays from this same period of Andreini’s career, i.e. La turca (The Lady Turk, 1611) and La sultana (The Sultana, 1622). 6 In these three works, the Mediterranean Sea performs an essential if complex thematic and theatrical function, simultaneously separating and connecting families, communities, cultures, and states scattered around its shores, at once affirming and making it possible to overcome the distance between them. In Andreini’s perspective, this great sea cannot be thought of simply in geographical terms—i.e. as an ensemble of bodies of water, set between three continents—but rather as a unique scene of human interaction and exchange, in which unfold acts of civility and barbarity, magnanimity and cruelty, love and violence: the Mediterranean is, in short, a Baroque stage. Andreini seems to have done little if any traveling by sea in the course of his long career as the capocomico and leading actor of his own company (known as ‘I Fedeli’). We know that he and the Fedeli moved chiefly between Florence, the cities of the Po Valley, Venice and Paris over the first two decades of the seventeenth century. 7 Andreini nevertheless must have known a good deal about the Mediterranean Sea, especially concerning the dangers of piracy and slavery that menaced travelers across its waters in the Cinque-Seicento as the Ottoman Empire and the Christian West fought for control. For his father, the renowned actor Francesco Andreini (1548-1624), had in his youth been captured while serving as a soldier and enslaved for a number of years by the Ottoman Turks before escaping to Italy. 8 Many others in the early modern period—well over a 5 I wish to thank here the second anonymous reader for California Italian Studies , who elegantly notes in regard to Andreini’s defense—as actor, playwright and capocomico —of the theatrical profession in the face of the moral and religious strictures of his era: “in questo senso la metafora marinara della scrittura proposta da Andreini […] trova un ulteriore sviluppo: l’attore che diventa autore e che riceve l’attenzione di illustri protettori acquista, nei confronti dei suoi colleghi, la nobiltà del corsaro che serve un regno, innalzandolo al di sopra dei vili pirati che servono soltanto il loro interesse.” These “pirates” are to be identified with the actors of other commedia dell’arte troupes, whose performances defied the literary and social decorum of the Counter-Reformation and, in Andreini’s eyes, discredited their (and his) profession. 6 G.B. Andreini, La turca comedia boscareccia e maritima (Casale Monferrato: Pantaleone Goffi, 1611), and La sultana (Paris: Nicolas De La Vigne, 1622). Some scholars believe that the text of La turca was first published in Casale Monferrato in 1608, although no copy is known to exist of this printing: see G.B. Andreini, La Maddalena lasciva e penitente , ed. Rosella Palmieri (Bari: Palomar, 2006), 298n5. An alternate translation for La sultana could be The Sultan’s Daughter : the term ‘sultana’ may be used in English to refer to wives, sisters, or daughters of a sultan, but in this case there is no question that it designates the Sultana as the daughter of an Ottoman sultan. 7 The best accounts of Andreini’s itinerant existence as an actor are to be found in Siro Ferrone, Attori mercanti corsari: la commedia dell’arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), and Arlecchino: vita e avventure di Tristano Martinelli attore (Bari: Laterza, 2006). For an English-language biographical sketch of Andreini, see Jon R. Snyder, “Editor’s Introduction,” in G.B. Andreini, Love in the Mirror , ed. and trans. Jon R. Snyder, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, Toronto Series, 2 (Toronto: ITER/CRRS, 2009), 1-17. 8 Alessandro D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano , 3 vols. (Turin: Loescher, 1891, 2 nd rev. ed.), Vol. 2, 482, claims that Francesco Andreini was a prisoner of the Turks for eight years. 2 million Christian and Muslim men, women and children, according to the historian Robert C. Davis—also experienced bondage somewhere on or around the Mediterranean, principally as a result of warfare, piracy, or corsair raids. 9 It should therefore be no surprise if this great sea—made up of many bodies of water, from the Alboran Sea to the Aegean, from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian and beyond—plays such a prominent role in these three comedies. Although never named as such by Andreini, in his comedies the Mediterranean is truly that which is “between the lands,” the interposing space that must be ceaselessly traversed by subjects, cultures, faiths and states. Indeed, in these plays the sea figures, like language itself, as that which lies in between human beings, with the potential both to bring them together and to keep them forever apart. 10 Across these often troubled waters Andreini’s comic characters pass—if not always effortlessly—from the Christian to the Ottoman sphere or vice versa. The ablest of all are the pirates and corsairs that infest the sea(s) with their fast, elusive galleys, preying upon not only merchant ships, along with their passengers and crew, but also coastal dwellers, from fisher-folk to peasants to artisans. Powerful enough to defy or even to defeat an armada sent to stop them, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the pirates and corsairs of the Mediterranean transformed—and sometimes devastated—entire coastal economies by undermining agriculture, fishing, commerce and trade anywhere near the coastline. 11 The difference between ‘corsair’ and ‘pirate’ is not apparent in Andreini’s plays, although there is in fact an important distinction to be made between the former, operating more or less with a mandate from a sovereign state, and the latter, acting wholly outside of the law. 12 Perhaps this distinction mattered little to the galley slaves who were crowded into a vessel’s hold for months and years at a time.

Load more